Cianne Fragione and Seth Adelsberger push the limits of their respective media to reveal the immediacy and spontaneity involved in the creative process.

Using paint, textiles, paper, and assemblage, Fragione creates work that combines three narrative elements: her childhood growing up in an Italian immigrant neighborhood in Connecticut, her previous dance career in ballet and jazz, and her visual art training in the San Francisco Bay Area during the beat and funk movement.

In the larger context of the art world, however, I concur with Phil Davis's curatorial remarks that accompanied an exhibition at Gateway Arts Center “… Fragione’s art pours over with the physical material of paint and mark-making as an act of exploration. Her complex use of color and her layered covering-up of forms create images that reveal themselves slowly and with great reward. An inheritor of the San Francisco Bay Area School of abstract expressionism, her paintings “… are at once of this time and also firmly rooted in the uniquely American abstract expressionist tradition.”

Baltimore-based artist Seth Adelsberger questions traditional notions of painting and printmaking through the use of unusual materials and rearrangement of the standard steps in artmaking.

"[Adelsberger’s] work is very strong visually and aesthetically. His paintings really grab your eye. But they're also very interesting conceptually and historically. They relate back to artworks done in the late 1950s and 1960s by Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning and Frank Stella, and that gives what Seth is doing a lot of heft." ---Kristen Hileman, Curator of Contemporary Art, Baltimore Museum of Art